Tara Brach - Part 1 - The Art and Science of Meditation - Introductory Series

Episode Date: October 13, 2010

2010-10-13 - Part 1 - The Art and Science of Meditation - Introductory Series - The first session defines meditation and describes the Buddhist teachings that give a context to the path of practice. We explore the two basic types of meditation--concentration and mindfulness--and then focus on the ground of mindfulness training: bringing mindful attention to the breath and bodily sensations. Guided meditations include setting intention and the sacred pause; learning to "come back" using an anchor of the breath; and "being here" with an embodied presence. Please donate at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Thank you!

So welcome. We are beginning a four-part series here to explore the art and science of meditation. And during these four classes, we'll be looking at really how do you meditate, how do you work with the challenges, the difficulties that come up during the practice of meditation, will be exploring really the understandings of how does it work and what really makes meditation effective. And lastly, exploring the Buddhist teachings that provide a context that give you some background to the path. And we will be taking these teachings

and applying them to the domains of our bodies, how to wake up presence in the body, how to work with difficult emotions, how to work with thoughts, with obsessive thoughts, and then how to bring meditation into daily life. So there's the domains we cover. And the format will be that I'll be speaking some and I'll be giving instructions

and we'll do some short practice periods. But if you really want to benefit, if you really want to discover what is possible, then the invitation is, Let this time period with meditation be one where you really experiment and create some space and practice. See how it works for you. So the first thing is, well, what is meditation? What do we mean by meditation?

And one easy definition for me really is it's a training of attention. And in particular, it's a training and attention that wakes us up out of our habit. spiritual thinking patterns out of our condition mind, and it reveals the nature of reality. What that means is it reveals the nature of who we are. And one of the descriptions I love is that it reveals our basic goodness, our what's sometimes described as Buddha nature. And that actually points to the fruit of practice and the reason that we practice, which really is by paying attention, we end up coming home to a wholeness of being where we can realize our natural wisdom and our natural compassion. Now, as we'll explore for different people, that homecoming has different expressions.

And so for some of you, the felt sense will be one of a relaxing back and touching peace. And for others, it's that happiness that, happy for no reason. The happiness, it's not hitched to externals. And for some people, it's this freedom of the heart to love without holding back. It has different ways of expressing itself. In some very basic way, the practice of meditation frees us to both serve and to savor life. And I love that combination of words. to serve and to savor.

Now, when we talk about the umbrella of meditation and what it includes, there is a huge range of practices. And for some, what you might think of it as it can include chanting and visualization and prayer, contemplation. But the kind of meditation that we'll be focusing on here is Buddhist meditation,

and in particular, Buddhist meditations that cultivate mindfulness and open-heartedness. So that's where we're going to be where we bring our attention. And by way of background, most every meditation you'll run into anywhere falls into one of two categories. It either falls into the category of concentration

where there's a mind training to get some one-pointedness of attention and usually using an object like the breath and coming back again and again until the mind gets quiet and settled and tranquil. So that's one whole branch. And then a whole other branch of meditation is described as mindfulness or insight meditation

where rather than a narrowed focus and quieting the mind, there's really an open attention. And the purpose of mindfulness is to be with life just as it is and in that presence to gain insight into the mind. nature of reality. We'll be practicing this latter version. It's also described as

viphasana to see clearly. And just so that you know in this latter version, this mindfulness cluster, concentration is considered a support. It's part of it. It's just not the goal. Okay? So this gives you kind of a background of the kind of practices we're going to be doing. a story to begin. And this story was one of the first stories that I heard when I first started meditation in the Buddhist tradition. And in it, a woman decides

that she's going to go to India to see the guru. And her travel... She's an older woman, and her travel agent's a little bit disturbed. She says, well, why don't you go to Florida like you normally do? And the woman's insistent she wants to see the guru.

So the travel agent sets up the reservations, and there's the long flight all the way over to India. And then the train ride that takes forever. And while she's on the train, she tells some folks she's going to see the guru. They happen to know of this particular guru. And they say, you know, you can only say three words. And she goes, I know, I know.

Bus ride after she gets off the train and she gets to the encampment. There's tons of people in a long line up to the tent where the guru is seeing people. Again, she's reminded, just three words. I know, I know. It's her turn. She's up front. She walks into the tent and there he is with his his saffron robes and his like little wispy beard. And she looks at him and she says, Sheldon, come home. Now the reason I loved hearing that story and I like to share it is that, and this is changing now, but meditation for so long was considered this exotic Eastern thing. and that it was for other people

or you did it up in some cave somewhere. And meditation is a training that has been part of every religion and is the wisest part of most cultures. And what I find in these classes here and many places I teach is that people come from all the different religious traditions, you know, Muslim and Hindu and Jewish and Christian

and Baha'i and on. and secular humanism and so on. And they come because they found that a systematic training of the mind helps us to tap into what we most cherish. It helps us to go to the mystical source of whatever religious affiliation we have, the direct experience. And people want that. People want a direct experience.

Now, I've noticed, that when I say to people, you know, well, what brings you here to these classes or to meditation, there's often the immediate reasons. So much stress, I need to relax. Or anger, you know, I'm just, I really need to kind of chill our anxiety, our self-esteem, confidence. So there's sometimes specific things like that. And as many of you know, this is so much becoming mainststere. that you can find in medical schools and in high schools and addiction facilities and prisons and all sorts of organizations

that people are learning to meditate to reduce all those forms of stress. And people come for something more. And again, it's what I was referring to before, which is we each have a longing. We're kind of speeding along in this life, and we have this longing to not race to the finish line and miss out. You know, we have a longing to live the life fully and to love, to love fully.

And so there is this yearning for something that kind of can wake us up from our habitual ways, what I often call a trance, for a spiritual freedom to be all that we are. I get asked very often, okay, I've got some years. yearning for this, but really, how do I start? You know, what gets me going? What will get me going? And the one place I usually spend the most time with people that are new is on what I call conscious intention. I have a line that I share as often as I can remember from the Zen tradition, those of you that have sat with me before know it, that the most important thing is remember the most important thing.

In the moments that in some way you slow down and ask yourself, so what really matters? And I'm kind of inviting you to do it right now. Just sense, if you ask yourself, well, what really matters to me? Just even the question, even remembering to ask the question, begins to help you settle back into who you are. So we begin meditation practice by getting in contact with really what most matters to us. And I think the word that captures it for me is sincerity.

That when we feel sincere, like this, my heart cares about this. Then the process unfolds in quite a beautiful way. The second piece I emphasize when people really want to know about getting started, I use the language of the sacred pause that the only way to begin to experience presence is to be willing to pause. We're on this kind of tumbling forward track. Have you noticed how many moments

there's in some way a sense of on my way to something else? Have you noticed that? That we're doing this because we're on our way to the next thing and we're on our way to a Monday or a vacation or whatever it is, we're not here so much. It is a very, very speedy culture and our minds are speeding along and our bodies move around a lot. I read you from Thomas Merton, Christian mystic. He says, the rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form,

of contemporary violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone and everything, is to succumb to violence. So we begin this path

and we come back again and again to this basics of, okay, so what matters to me? And am I willing to pull? pause. Am I willing to create some space right here to arrive, to come into presence? So I'd like to do, we're going to do a few short meditations today. But just to, we're going to do a brief one right now, but just to say that in the Chinese script, the word for busy is very close to the word heart killing. And I think of meditation, this path of awakening, as willingly, as willingly step

out of our busyness so that our hearts can be free to open again. I can speak for myself and say that when I'm busy, there's not the quality of visceral tenderness. I can tune into some things but I'm not a sensitive. And I think that's probably true for most people. So there's a choice to pause, to slow down, to be here. So that's our first, that's going to be the content of our first little us together just to take these moments if you will to you may want to close your eyes and feel your body and let yourself come into the sitting posture that allows you to be alert so you're sitting upright but also relaxed for many of us that means perhaps sitting up a little bit taller but not be stiff the spine is tall the chin slightly tucked the

shoulders relax back and down to very consciously sense this is a pause. You are taking a pause to arrive to come back home into your being and in this pause just to sense okay what really does matter to me. What is bringing me to meditation? What matters in this life? We ask that question what's my intention for being here. Then just to listen as if you're you're listening to your heart. Perhaps you'll hear something that you've said many times to yourself that's habitual and just simply whisper the question inwardly again. So what really matters to me? Tell you sense that sincerity of heart. We ask the question what really matters and then whatever we touch into to then just relax a relaxed attentiveness. Know that you're here, right here.

sensing that when you hear the sounding of the gong that you can bring this relaxed attentiveness into a continued listening. Just sensing the value of this pausing. Okay. So we're going to be of course meditating again in a few minutes

but I just wanted to give you a sense of really the beginning of any practice which is sensing our intention and being willing to pause. The Buddha had a very simple and elegant description of the spiritual path that's famously known as the four noble truths. And what I love about the four noble truths are there some, they are really something that we each can intuit very directly ourselves. They come down to the realness of suffering and the realness that we sense this possibility of freedom, that we sense, this possibility of freedom,

that we intuit this possibility of happiness, of being more loving and awake. And the first of the noble truths, the Buddha described, is that basically we have this universal conditioning towards suffering, and it comes down to wanting life different. That's the simplicity of it,

that in any moment that we want life different than it is, there's some degree of suffering. In some way, and it can be very subtle, it can feel like things aren't quite right, that something's off, it can be more dramatic, something's wrong, that we're at war with how it is. So that's the first noble truth,

it's basically saying there's this unsatisfactoriness that can be experienced in the moment. And many people experience it just as a restlessness, that there's just this uneasiness that makes it hard to rest in the moment. And when I was first introduced to the noble truths, and I heard this first one, that there's this universal conditioning

to be at odds with how it is, to be anxious or depressed or at war or in conflict, I found it to be a really big relief. And I'm just sharing that because I've run into many people that had the same experience, that it wasn't so personal. I knew that inside me there was all this neurotic reactivity going on. But then when I started hearing that these human bodies are reactive, these hearts are reactive,

that we are conditioned to be at odds with things, actually made it easier to just sense, oh, okay, so it's not my fault. So the first noble truth actually says just that, that this is the universal conditioning. And the second noble truth says, here's the cause of it. The cause of it is, when there's pleasantness, we try to hold on to it. We try to get more. When there's unpleasantness, we try to push it away. Most moments have qualities of pleasantness and unpleasantness,

which means in most moments, we're in some way trying to control our experience. most of the time we're moving through life trying to manage things. It's very rare that there's this just as it is, this life just as it is in this moment is perfectly fine, thank you. That's rare. So we're in this kind of chronic controlling, and that's what I describe as a trance. The Buddha sometimes talked about it as a dream.

There's a sense of a self, kind of a controlling ego that's trying to make this happened this way and not have that happen that way. And in the moments of controlling, we can't see things how they actually are. As long as we're fiddling with the controls, we can't actually see life clearly. Nor can we be at home with ourselves.

We're in some way off balance. So that's the second noble truth. The second noble truth is that we get into this controlling, this kind of chronic controlling, and in a very personal way we start feeling deficient. Like not only is something missing or wrong, but it's me that's wrong. Something's wrong with me.

I'm the deficient one. And then we are trying to fix ourselves all the time, improve ourselves. Some of you might remember one of my favorite prayers that goes, Dear God, so far today I've done all right. I haven't gossip, been greedy, been grumpy, nasty, selfish. are overindulgent and I'm very thankful for that.

But in a few minutes God, I'm going to get out of bed. And from then on I'm probably going to need a lot of help. So this is the second noble truth which you might summarize as saying in some way being at war with how things are, not aligned, not at home with ourselves or the world. And I've come to really think of it as that our sickness is home sickness. and you can kind of explore that and just ask the question you know am I at home this moment in this body

you know am I at home in this heart am I at home with this person and what we find is in some way there's a bit of a sense of separation and reactivity it's not so easy to feel at home so this homesickness forgetting our belonging forgetting who we really are I remember when my son was in a Waldorf school, he was in, I think, third grade, and one of the stories circulating in the Waldorf School was of this art teacher who in her art class had the children grouped at these different tables, and they were drawing. And one little girl was really excited about her drawing, completely into it.

And the teacher kind of stood behind her and asked her what she was drawing, and the little girl said, I'm drawing God. and the teacher kind of chuckled and said, but hon, nobody knows what God looks like. And without looking up, without missing a beat, she said, they will in a moment. So the second noble truth, we forget. We get disconnected. But the third noble truth, as this little girl kind of illustrates,

is a sense that freedom is possible. We can remember. We can trust and realize who we really are. We can discover the happiness that's not hitched to externals. The third noble truth is very simple. It's just this intuition. Freedom is possible. Or a full realization of that.

The fourth noble truth is the path. It's here's how. Here's how you come back home. Here's how you remember. And it's based on a meditative attention that's brought into all elements of life. One of my favorite illustrations of the path, are metaphors, is a better way to put it. In the ancient capital of Sukhitae in Thailand,

there is this old temple, and for many years it was a huge, huge clay Buddha in the temple. And it was not a particularly aesthetic statue. It was just huge. I mean, really huge, and it had lasted for many, many years, years and so it was revered for its staying power through different armies coming through and different changes of government and different storms and so on it just lasted so in recent years this is about eight years ago now it started to crack because of a long dry season so one of the

monks took this pen flashlight because he was interested in seeing the infrastructure and he peered into one of the cracks and what shown back was the light of gold and And so then the other monks got interested, and they all sort of looking into the cracks. And they dissembled the plaster clay outer covering and found that it was the largest pure gold statue of the Buddha in Southeast Asia. And now people go all over to visit it. But what was interesting about this, and this is what the monks believed, was that the statue had been covered with plaster and clay to protect it through difficult times. through all the ages when all these different dangers

to it would happen, periods of conflict and unrest. And much in the same way, we humans cover over our innate purity to get through, to get by, to make it in a difficult world. The more difficult a life that we're having, the more we cover over who we are,

And what is sad, and this is the elemental teaching here, is that we become identified with our covering, with our defenses and our ways of trying to make it through, and we forget who we are. We forget who's looking through the mask. We forget. And just to say it a little bit differently, every day we spend large swaths in a trance

where we're not remembering. We're very goal-oriented and a lot of our thoughts and activities are fear-driven. We're the golden Buddha but covered over and we're forgetting. And I think one of the best descriptions of the path is just remembering who's looking through. I mean, who's listening right now, really? That alert inner stillness

and that space of awareness that's right here, that heart that's right here. So it's a path of remembering of reawakening to who's here. In the Buddha's enlightenment story, he had his enlightenment experience. And shortly after he was wandering around, and many people would see him and be very struck by the glow that he had. You know, he had just been enlightened. He could look good.

So they would ask him, you know, who are you? And they'd say, are you a saint? And said, no. Are you a magician? No. Are you a Deva or an angel? No. Are you a man?

No. Okay, so what are you? And it was with some real interest. And his response was, I am awake. And that's what the word Buddha means. Awake. So meditation is really a path of waking up. And one of the one of the words,

the ways that I think it's most useful to understand meditation, I like the image of this wheel of awareness. And you might imagine that the hub of the wheel, this kind of center of presence, is right here. It's when we're awake and open. And there's all these spokes, infinite numbers of spokes that leave presence and mostly thoughts. You know, we just leave the hub and go off in thoughts travel out the spokes to the rim and we just circle around we spend a lot of our day kind of wheeling through the day circling around in our thoughts and habitual thoughts and so the practice of meditation is to begin to recognize okay on the rim and this incessant inner dialogue or whatever it is come back come back and that's part one of meditation come back

And the second part of meditation is be here. So the rest of the evening, this is what we're going to explore, this coming back, and then being here. So now coming back, we'll start with that. The strategy or the, it's sometimes described as the skillful means, that's the kind of Buddhist lingo that helps us come back, is to have an anchor or a home base. And many, many people are familiar with,

having the breath as an anchor or home base. And this is where we get a bit of the training and concentration because we choose one thing we're going to come back to. And tonight I'm going to emphasize the breath, but it doesn't have to be the breath. For many people, sounds as an anchor. For other people, touch points in the body, like feeling the hands are the feet where they're touching the floor. For some people, it's feeling the sense of sitting on your cushion. or chair. Okay, so there's many different anchors. The best ones I find, the most useful are present-centered anchors, sensory anchors.

But we'll use the breath tonight. And what we do is we feel the breath, arrive with the breath, and then the practice or training and coming back is notice when you leave and just invite yourself back to be with this breath. Now for some of you that might sound okay back to basics and others that are new it might sound very very hard it is basic and it is hard

okay I mean we just leave over and over again in thoughts some of you might remember from James Joyce one of the characters and there was a line Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body

you know we leave over and over again. So this first training we're going to do and we're going to practice in a few moments is really the training in this muscle of noticing you're in a trance. Come back. Come back. Okay, so let's try it. Let's try this first part of coming back to the hub. It's helpful when you close your eyes to feel your body from the inside out and adjust your posture so that you can feel a sense of stability and uprightness. Once you're sitting tall, because that supports being alert, see if it's possible to relax the different muscles in your

body. So there's no tension, or as little tension as possible. In particular, you might want to relax the shoulders. See if you can let go a little. It can help to feel the shoulders and the inside out a kind of dissolving, a melting sensation. The ice to water, to vapor, letting go. Feel the hands from the inside. And you might soften the hands and feel the life in the hands. Let the chest be open and softening the belly.

So this next breath is received in a softening belly. This breath. and this one, and again. Just as a glass can be filled with water, this whole body can be filled with awareness. So feel the sense of right here, being right here. You might even whisper the word here, let your senses be awake.

And feeling the inflow and outflow of the breath now. For some it's helpful to take a few full breaths, just to really sense the sensations and movement of the breath. And then notice where you feel the breath most easily. And that might be at the nostrils or the back of the throat. Might be the movement of the chest, the rising, falling of the abdomen. Just with a relaxed attention,

sense where the breath is most easy to detect and perhaps most pleasant. And begin to let the attention rest in a soft, easy way. with the movement of the breath. See if it's possible to relax with the breath, relax with the inflow, and relax with the outflow.

This breath is a home base, but you might notice pretty quickly that the mind leaves, which is not a problem. It's just how minds are, just the way body secretes enzymes, the mind secretes thoughts. But when you notice that,

That's the time to pause and just to gently invite yourself back again. You might mentally whisper thinking, thinking, just as a way of noting that that's happening so you're not lost inside the thought and then relax, arriving right back here in this next in breath or out breath, rising breath, falling breath. breath, keeping it very simple, relaxing with the movement of the breath. When you notice the mind is left, pausing, re-relaxing, arriving back right here again, coming back. I might notice where your attention is without any judgment if the mind's been drifting in thoughts of the future or past, commentary. Just notice that. And reopen the attention. Pausing and sensing the space you're in.

You might notice the sounds. You might re-relax a little in the body. Any habitual tightening, letting the shoulders relax the hands, relax the heart. And gently come back again to this life breath. Acted and attentive. Know that you're here, right here. I sometimes think of this first part, this coming back as re-mindfulness, that we're kind of remembering, oh yeah, I was going to be here, and we're just inviting ourselves back here. And one of my favorite images of this training is really training a puppy. Because think of this mind. I mean, it's, the mind just does. what it does, just like a out of control little puppy. I mean, you know, a puppy goes and peas in the corner and you don't punish the puppy. Well, our minds do worse. Our minds have no shame.

They'll just do whatever they do. And the best attitude I know for training the mind is one of being deeply friendly, deeply friendly towards this mind, no matter how much you feel like, hey, I'm supposed to be with the breath and it's just obsessive thoughts non-stop. It's okay. You know, just thank you very much. Come on back. Here we are. So one of the, one woman I saw, showed me this ad for a necklace.

It's on this cord. It's a little dog bone. And it says on the necklace, it says sit, stay, heal. And I thought that would be really kind of fun. We could start all wearing these little dog bone necklaces. But that's really, we're learning to stay. And the mind will just keep jumping up and going off all over the place. So this first training is to choose something that feels accessible, like the breath or like the sensations in the body,

so that when you realize you've left, you have a place to come back to that's here that has a quality of presence. Now often people ask me when they start practicing with the breath in particular they ask me about the tension there because sometimes when we start paying attention to the breath it can be like we're trying to hold our attention to something and there's a tightness around the breath and it's almost like the breath can feel forced or difficult and just to say and just to encourage you

that with whatever you're attending to, particularly with the breath, sense that you're receiving the breath. You're not trying to make the breath be in any particular way. Your only purpose is to notice what it's like with this very gentle, receptive presence. And understand that the conditioning of your mind is to leave. Our minds are conditioned to leave presence

and to go foraging around. There's even something called the default network and our brain that science has discovered that shows how whenever we're not occupied with a task, our brains are designed to go into the past and the future to keep constructing a sense of a self in time. In other words, we're designed to not have a meditative mind. And I think it's really helpful to know that

because then we won't blame ourselves because most people I know confide in me that they don't really have a good mind for meditating. And I always have to say join the club. None of us do. We all leave. So, one wonderful Buddhist teacher, Ajum Buda Dasa, Thai teacher, was asked to describe this world, and his description was lost in thought.

That we live in a virtual reality most of the time. And when we take a look and we're honest, we realize that. So we're doing a training that's pretty radical, which is to say thoughts can be are absolutely essential for survival and are a necessary part of the spiritual path, and the training is to learn how to wake up from the trance of thinking. So your mind will drift, and Julia Childs has a good way of putting it. She says, if you drop the lamb, just pick it up.

Who will know? If the mind goes off, just notice it. Just, okay, come on back. Okay, so that's the first part. Coming back and the attitude is critical. I found that if you go at this first step of kind of concentrating and trying to quiet the mind and coming back to the breath,

and there's a sense that thoughts are the enemy, you'll be at war with your thoughts for the rest of your life. And there'll be a sense of your failing in the meditation practice. but if instead the attitude is interest and friendliness, then gradually the mind will quiet itself. It will happen. Part one, this concentrating and stilling the mind some,

if you imagine a camera, it's like you're focusing and aiming the camera. You're trying to get things steady. This next piece, there's coming back, remember being here, is like taking the picture. Okay? So concentrations like focusing the camera, mindfulness is taking the picture, seeing what's actually right here. So we're going to spend a little time with how do we really develop or cultivate this capacity to be here. And first I'd like to give you a definition for mindfulness, which is mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose. Okay, it's intentional.

in the present moment and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of moment-to-moment experience. So it's on purpose. Mindfulness is kind of, you have an intention. I'm paying attention on purpose. It's right here, this moment, and it's without judgment. That's key. So the two factors I'd like you to, as a takeaway, if there's any two things you remember about mindfulness,

that you're recognizing what's going on right here, and you're allowing it. Recognizing and allowing. And I think of allowing as we're basically saying yes to whatever is happening here. And yes, doesn't mean, yes, I love this, or yes, I want this to keep happening. It just means, yes, this is the actuality of what's happening,

so you're creating a space for what's real. Recognizing and allowing. many people find it helpful to turn this into two questions, these two basic facets of mindfulness. And one question is, what is happening inside me right now? You can try this on, just like, what is happening inside me right now?

And that's the recognizing feature of mindfulness. And the second is, can I be with this? R, can I let this be? saying yes. What we find with mindfulness is if there's any argument with what's happening.

In other words, if we're seeing what's going on but on some level we're reacting to it, we don't want it to be here, we're judging ourselves for what's happening, then we can't have the kind of full presence that really sees what's going on.

Many of you might remember the film Gorillas in the Mist, which Diane Fossi's this remarkable film, field biologist who befriends a tribe of guerrillas. And she's following in the footsteps of George Shaler, who's her mentor. And he became renowned when he returned from the wilderness, and he had more data, more intimate data about the family habits and patterns of guerrilla life than any

scientists have been able to collect before that. And when his colleagues tried to figure out, well, what did he do? do that we didn't do? You know, what allowed him to get all this information? There was one thing that stood out. He didn't carry a gun. You know, everybody else had gone into the wilderness before him with these big rifles and something, these big, gentle creatures had sensed the fear or the aggression or whatever and had kept a real distance and did not reveal themselves. Whereas, George Shaler respected them, respected the apes. And he went in without a weapon.

And I think sensing his good heart, his, maybe his benevolence, they allowed him in and then also allowed Diane Fossi in and let them learn their ways. I love this story because to me it gives, it's a beautiful illustration of the key qualities to mindfulness. when you pay attention to your inner life, if you can do it in a way that's disarming. In other words, the parts of ourselves that are vulnerable

or that are not used to being seen will not reveal themselves if you're approaching yourself with any sort of critique. And of course, it's the same thing in your relationships with others. So if you want to have an intimate relationship with your inner life, we have to put down the gun. We have to be willing to not judge what's here just to be with it.

So this is the understanding of being here. Being here means recognizing this moment-to-moment experience and allowing it. And in being here and back to this image of the wheel of awareness, we arrive again to inhabit the hub. And the hub isn't this confined hub. The hub is actually this very open space of awareness. where the spokes and the rim and everything is free to come and go. We're resting in a kind of vastness of natural awareness.

I'm going to toss in one more metaphor for you, which is that that vastness you might think of like an ocean of awareness. And when we're resting in a big awareness, there's room for whatever waves come and go. And sometimes it's been described that if we have like just a sink, sink and we put some dye in it, you know, it'll color the water. But if you have a lake and put some dye in it, it doesn't. And similarly, when you rest in a mindful awareness, a fullness of awareness, there's room for these waves to come and go. And rather than being reactive or tainted,

we can see the nature of what's here. We can be intimate with the life that's here. in these four classes we're going to be exploring how to bring this mindful attention this non-judging presence to the life of the body to our emotional life to thoughts to this virtual reality we had caught in and then to our relational world to daily life the beginning though and this is very much the kind of the ground level called the first foundation of mindfulness in the Buddhist teachings is the level of body and sensation. And you might even just ask yourself as you've been listening, did you leave your body since we did that last meditation?

I won't ask for a hand raised, but, you know, it's interesting to check in. It's not our habit to inhabit our body. We leave regularly. I ask you just to do a brief exercise. Close rush for a moment. Just try this one out.

So be aware of pausing. Let your attention be here. And imagine that you're an enlightened being. You're a Buddha, Christ. Just imagine that. Your awareness is wide open and awake and free. An enlightened being, loving what is, loving this life, holding this world in your heart,

experiencing this world, this life around you, you and inside you. And as you imagine this, take some moments to attend to your body and sense what it's like. Okay, you can open your eyes. Now, when I do this with people, the first response I get is this kind of surprise that actually we can imagine ourselves as enlightened beings, which I would say the reality is we all are awakening Buddhas, and it's not far away. In fact, it's always right here and just even sensing, okay, an awakening Buddha. You know, the golden Buddha's right here, we can tap into that. But the next thing that people discover is that when there's an open presence, there's a lot of aliveness. There's a lot of aliveness. You can sense this changing

flow of life flowing through you. And the reverse is true also, that when you start to contact your aliveness. When you let your attention come into the body and feel that aliveness, you can feel your connection with the rest of the world, and not only that, you can feel the presence that's aware. The Buddha taught that this entire world exists in this fathom long body, this entire world. And that as we awaken to the life of the body, we awaken to reality. We can actually see the nature of reality. We can sense that it's a changing flow of aliveness, this web of life, and nothing is apart from anything else. Everything is connected. We can also see that everything's changing and it's like a moving rope. You know, if you

grab a moving rope, you get rope burn. In this life, if we try to grab on, hold on, control, we get rope burn. They're suffering. And when we let go, we can enter the flow and actually actually discover a very, very peaceful and vast awareness. So the Buddha taught, start with the body. Start with this first foundation of the body and come to the aliveness of the body. And I want to read you a quote from John O'Donohue, one of my favorite poets and philosophers.

He says, our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. It is our minds that make our lives so homeless. So this is the next step of this mindfulness practice, can we come back and really inhabit these bodies? Now let me ask you to check something out. Just again, closing your eyes. Just to reflect and sense, is there anything in this moment between me and being at home in my body? You can continue to reflect if you'd like to open your eyes. You can. For what happens, for many people, what we discover is that it's not so easy to feel at home in our body.

Sometimes it's because it just feels unfamiliar. We're used to paying attention elsewhere. Sometimes it just feels out of control, which it is, because nature is not within our control. And sometimes there's unpleasantness. And I'll often say, well, so the practice is to be with what's here. And a question that comes up regularly is, well, why would I want to learn to stay with unpleasantness? Okay, that's a seemingly pretty reasonable question. And yet, what we find out is that to the degree our life is trying to find, you know, escape strategies from unpleasantness, we actually suffer.

That we suffer because we leave. And there's an equation that many people have found helpful, which is pain times resistance equals suffering. to the degree that we resist discomfort, we suffer. And you can sense that, I mean, we know it with birthing. You know, if we resist the pain of labor, that resistance causes more pain. It's the same thing with back injuries. I know I have a number of friends who do a lot of work with people that have injured their backs and say that the biggest challenge with back injuries is the tendency to try to tighten against the injury,

to avoid more injury and it actually is what it's what makes healing difficult, prevents healing. There's an understanding that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. And that mindfulness changes our relationship with pain. We cannot avoid being in these bodies and having unpleasantness. But what we can do is relate to them in the way where we become an ocean and the waves can come and go, but we're not at war with the unpleasantness. And again, it's these questions. What's going on in this body right now?

Can I say yes? So we're going to practice a little bit with this, with this mindfulness of the body, but just to say that it's helpful to get rid of the word pain and just consider a constellation of sensations. Also notice if there's fear around that constellation of sensations. The teaching is to stay with what's here, but if it becomes really intense, if it throws you off balance, not to stay with what's here. There's a real wisdom to knowing, okay, enough with being with this unpleasant sensation, let me pay attention to the breath, to sounds, maybe stand up, maybe move, maybe walk, whatever.

So it's not that training and mindfulness means thou shaltz, stand, sit still, be still, be still. be with whatever, it just means that we try to get out of the habit of reflexively moving away from discomfort. Okay? We're going to practice a little bit, but the last thing before we practice is to say, I'm mentioning unpleasantness. What about pleasantness? There's sometimes a misunderstanding that we're not supposed to enjoy pleasantness. And actually, I find that most people pull away from pleasantness too. They're trying to grab onto it or make it more, but there's also a fear of our full aliveness. So again, the training and mindfulness is to notice sensations and let this life be just as it is. Okay? So again, pausing again, just letting the attention go inward. This is our

final meditation of the evening. And in this pause, very consciously invite your awareness into the body. You might soften the eyes, slight smile at the mouth, relax the shoulders, the hands. Let's take a few full breaths together and then letting the breath resume its natural rhythm, feel yourself arriving with the breath,

relaxed attention with the inflow and the outflow. But since the breath is a current that's occurring in a larger field of sensation, aware of your body sitting here, relaxed presence, we let the breath be in the foreground, but if you notice any other strong sensations, pleasant or unpleasant,

then let that experience be the center of your attention, practicing this mindfulness that notices what it's like. heat or cool, squeezing, openness, flow, tension, tightness, prickly, whatever it is. Notice what it's like and sense, can I let this be just as it is? See if it's possible to say yes unconditionally to the sensations that are here. You might notice the mind has drifted and as we did before just practicing, coming back gently, perhaps re-relaxing a little in the body, reconnecting with the breath,

or if there's some other prominent sensations, breathing with and feeling them, knowing that you're here, right here, awaken this body, recognizing and allowing this flow of aliveness. You can deepen this mindful presence, this being here with the inquiry. What is happening inside me right now?

And can I be with this, exploring what it means to say yes in a cellular way to the life that's here? The poet Dorothy Hunt writes, In this choiceless, never-ending flow of life, there is an infant array of choices. One alone brings happiness to love what is. So every domain of mindful awareness arises out of this capacity to be present with the life of the body. And I invite you when you practice this week to practice coming back, coming back, and this being here and saying yes to the sensations that are right in the body.

Now, one of my favorite lines from Rumi is, do you pay? regular visits to yourself. I think it's a great question. And in a way, I'm about to make my pitch for practice now, which is this is a path of intimacy. One of the great Zen masters said

to be enlightened, to be completely awake and free, is to be intimate with all things. And that intimacy starts with intimate with the life that's right here. And if all you did, was take these pieces tonight of sensing your intention and pausing, letting the breath or some anchor help you to come back over and over again, and then begin to say, okay, yes to the life that's here, a profound capacity for intimacy will emerge. It takes patience, though. I remember

one of my places of practice over the years has been the Insight Meditation Society up in Barry. And early, early days, they got a letter that was addressed to them, and it was addressed to the instant meditation society. And I thought that was great, because, I mean, in a way, that's what we want. I mean, we, and it's very, very easy to judge ourselves for how it's going. It goes against the grain of our conditioning to practice. It really does. I mean, we're restless and it's almost like

the last thing we want to do is pause and sometimes get intimate with what's here and yet there's these beautiful words from Dorothy Hunt that are real freedom and happiness loving what is, what's right here. And if you can't love what

is, you can begin by being mindful of what is open-hearted towards it and actually the love unfolds itself. The love unfolds itself. So the invitation take a few minutes a day minimally. I find that if you commit yourself, you do a no matter what, but you say even if it's only a few minutes, that's okay, just to come into stillness. And for those of you that still is difficult, then walking meditation's

fine. And we have handouts on walking meditation available to you, and it's on our website, IMCW.org. But take a committed period of time where you sense your intention to be intimate with the life that's here. It's a gift to the soul and it's a gift to our world too. You know, I think of this practice

as very much a part of the evolution of consciousness that it's our conditioning to get lost in trance and we have this capacity to pay attention and to train our attention to wake up out of trance and it not only brings this incredible freedom and happiness to our own hearts it ripples out to the world so you are really meditating for our world by waking up your own heart and mind

there's a saying that enlightenment is an accident and practice makes you accident prone Okay, so our final will close tonight just to invite you to sense Okay, what does it mean to be intimate with the life that's here And just to feel your own commitment To learn this coming back, this being here As you pause in this way

Sense yourself pausing with others who are sitting here Others that are listening and others around the world That value this kind of homecoming that there is a path of practice of sensing the covering that we get identified with, those layers of plastic, layers of defenses,

and coming to realize that who we are is that golden Buddha, that goodness, and that we wake up when we pause and deepen our attention. These are the words of poet Dana Fowles. She says, in the shared quiet, an invitation arises

like a white dove, lifting from a limb and taking flight. Come and live in truth. Take your place in the flow of grace. All you have ever longed for is before you in this

moment if you dare draw in a breath and whisper yes. Thank you. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.